"Qu'est-ce que?" and "Was ist los?" they asked at the sight of thousands of people slowly zigzagging up the escalators and across three floors.

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What this is, dear visitors to our great city, are jobless New Yorkers, or 3,720 of them who had come - résumés in hand and hope in their hearts - to an employment fair put on by Monster.com, the job search site.

As I walked into the packed hall, I grew upset, for the mess the bonus-takers and their pocket-pols have gotten working people into. But that's not how they felt. At all.

The first had shown up at 6 a.m., four hours early. White, black, men, women, mothers, fathers, people with big mortgages, kids just out of college.

The ladies were in tasteful dresses and shoes; the men, in pinstriped suits and ties and pocket squares. Kevin Dunn, an Oregon native who just graduated from Brooklyn College, even wore a derby.

Almost all had been laid off in the last year. And they all remembered the exact date they were let go from Wall Street, big companies, retailers. There were lawyers and investment bankers. There was even a jobless job recruiter, Odell Vozzo.

And there was even 80-year-old Aaron Fink, who lost his car salesman job at Koeppel Mazda last month and who remembers the Great Depression. "I was one of six kids, and when we needed shoes, my father told us to wear our brothers' and put cotton in them," he said.

But this is the Great Recession, and as many times as I offered the opportunity to vent, these folks hurt worst by it refused, and took responsibility.

"We were all over-leveraged. It was good times, and we spent!" said Tony Thielman, a father of four with the energy of a standup comic who worked in financial technology.

Bank worker Kieron Barratt, who has small children and a big mortgage, said, "My hopes are way up. With President Obama's stimulus package, things are going to start to change."

And you believed him, and you believed Thielman and Vozzo, who when asked if they were pessimistic or optimistic, answered in unison, "Optimistic!"

And you believed all these people would turn their hope into determination and create their fate. Did you think New Yorkers weren't tough? Au contraire. Like Iris Carrington, a mother, who said, "I'm not buying anything, and I'll do secretarial, I'll do temp, I'll do any work."

"The Bible says all the riches in the world shall be turned over to the righteous," said a woman named Noreen. "We will get through this. The miracles will happen."